Last week two recommendations were made on how to handle long-term budget troubles in the USA. One was a duo appointed by Obama. These were Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson--both longterm Washington insiders. They proposed (1) raising the retirement age for Social Security to 69 by the year 2075, (2) decreasing the cost of living benefits for Social Security recipients, (3) imposing new limits on the Medicare health insurance program, and (4) ending several middle-class tax breaks.

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A less-talked about proposal was certainly more sane. This was the proposal from the Peterson-Pew Commission--and is referred to by Robert Kuttner on his slashing of the Bowles-Simpson proposal in a radio interview recently..

The Peterson-Pew Proposal would require the government branches to work together on long term budgets and keep them within spending bands and targets--ones that can be negotiated through times of catastrophe and times of abundance. (However, this sort of proposal does not include a solid set of progressive prerogatives.)

KEVIN STODA-has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades.--He sees himself as a peace educator and have been-- a promoter of good economic and social development--making-him an enemy of my homelands humongous DEFENSE SPENDING and its focus on using weapons to try and solve global (more...)